How To Get Accurate Web Traffic Visitor Reports using Cookies, IP Addresses and User Agents

How To Get Accurate Web Traffic Visitor Reports using Cookies, IP Addresses and User Agents

In a previous post, I explained how knowing and identifying your web visitors can help you improve your online services. In this post, I will discuss how you can use cookies, IP addresses and user agents to identify, analyze and count your web visitors.

Current web traffic analysis depends on the use of Cookies or IP addresses to identify web visitors. However, each of these techniques is flawed.

A listing of some of the more common problems with using cookies or IP addresses would include

• Cookies can be manually deleted by web visitors
• Cookies can be made to expire through programming
• Cookies can be blocked by the visitors’ browser
• IP addresses are not unique. Multiple visitors can use the same IP address and one visitor can use multiple IP addresses

Since web traffic analysis reports based on either cookies or IP Addresses do not give a 100% accurate count of web visitors, web analysts are continually researching better ways of identifying and counting web visitors.

In this post, I will introduce you to the use of a third technique which involves using a combination of cookies, IP addresses and User Agent information to identify, count and analyze web visitors.